“Why do you laugh?” asked the boy.
“I laugh because that was not nearly the entirety of the Hognissaga which I played for the house tonight, only some of the events from the concluding portion of the epic. I even passed over certain strophes from scenes of fighting, for the sake of the sentiments of the youthful minds in your family. And because they’re a little bit confusing to those who don’t know the poem of old.”
The boy sat up straighter, leaning forward, excited.
“What parts would they be? Can you play those parts for me?” he asked, fairly begging.
The minstrel smiled accommodatingly at him and nodded. “By way of explanation,” clarified the minstrel, “these verses occur before the burning of Atil’s great hall by Guthrin, his newly-wedded queen. It has been surmised that she burned down the hall on account of her great anger, with the intention of killing her guests. And this was the intention, but that which she felt most strongly in the moments by which she arranged to have the hall reduced to cinders was not her noteworthy anger, but rather a more than mortal terror which shook that woman to her very core.”
The boy shivered. “Of what was she so afraid?”
“Allow me sing to you from the Niphelungenlied those verses that will help you to understand why the wise queen had such a fear of visitors in her hall.”
The meistersinger stood up and lifted his fiddle. He commenced to produce from it, a terrifying series of screeching, clamorous, ravenous notes, which teemed from his fiddle bow like clouds of locusts and flies, like swarms of suffocating plague, at first dissonant and disorganized but at last winding and turning in ever-tightening spirals that rose and fell, high and low. Concluding at last in a grim and groaning grey drone that seemed to linger after he lowered his bow, lurking in the flickering black at the shadowy corners of the room. The effect had been terrible, terrifying, and the boy began to imagine he could see one of the meistersinger’s eyes—just one—beginning to glow deep down in the black socket in his face where it was set, a deep red coal that burned a long way down in that black hole. The boy thought that perhaps this man was in no wise blind in that strange eye.
Then, the citole was in his huge hands, and the blind minstrel began singing the secret verses in a voice so sudden and stark and unholy that the boy jumped at the start:
Twenty thousand Hunnish men came to kill the Nephilungs
As that summer sunlight waned, stíll came their unending throngs.
Trapped inside the dining hall: Hogni and his fighting men;
Truce they made with King Atil, by Guthrin was verboten.
She knew that as the night fell, once freed they would besiege
The towers of her castle and kill her with her liege.
‘Gallant men!’ cried Guthrin. ‘Shut the doors now. Trap them all!
Ready torches flaming! Hasten! Set alight the hall!
‘Now the sun to rest has gone; Hogni and his henchmen may
Not be slain by sword alone, as they may by light of day!’
So with hacks of heavy swords, and thrusting of their javelins
Hunnish soldiers drove towards the last of the Burgundians.
E'en as cattle driven back, pressed into the peasant’s pen,
So that vigorous attack routed Hogni’s fighting men.
Then the doors were sealed shut and the air with blackness smoked.
Flame and heat and face of death seen by eyes of men that choked.
Wildly did they lament, with what priceless air they had
Cursed the heat the fire sent. Unto Hogni one man said,
‘Such great thirst, this. I am killed!’ Hogni said, ‘If any thirsts,
Let them drink the blood here spilled. See how I will be the first.
‘In this hellish hall of fire, finer will you find the wine
Crushed from countless corpses than from clusters on the vine!
What choices do you have? Would you prefer be dead?’
So the thirsty soul removed his helmet from his head,
Came to a corpse near lying, held his helmet 'neath its wounds.
Its stab-wounds still were seeping and blood brimmed his goblet soon.
He drank, and sought to drink more, squeezed the tissues ’round the source
Untíl like unto fruit it poured its juices forth with force.
‘Such sustenance supreme is the blood that I imbibe!
Dreaded Death seems like a dream as blood keeps me alive!
Never drunk I better, nor did finer vintage taste!’
The others made to get them to the pooling blood with haste.
Deeply drank the Niphelungs and those Burgundian hosts.
Dripped the red drops on their tongues, poured its power down their throats.
And it gave them such a force, never known in all the lands,
They now could destroy the doors and stone walls with their hands.
Although it sounded as though the song should go on, the minstrel stopped and looked down at the trembling boy.
The boy finally managed the word that would not leave his shaken mind. “Hoh-huh-horrible!”
“Many do not know how those warriors covered their tracks, but what is true, which other hearers of the epic never will know, is that Hogni and his damned, blood-drinking troops did survive the attack at the castle of the Huns all those centuries ago. And given such power by the Devil himself, immortal they remain, chained in their bodies, condemned still to guzzle the blood of others so that they may retain their eternal and unholy existence. To this day, they wander the Earth, and all it is that they require…is that they be invited inside.”
The boy’s face slowly dawned in realization, and he bitterly wished the actual dawn were not still so far away. In terror, he bounded from the box he had sat upon, headed toward the door.
Instantly, the giant moved to block his path and then, with one unimaginably powerful hand the great man lifted the boy before him like a toy. Clutching to the fingers that had closed around his throat, the boy struggled to breathe.
“If you scream, I will behead you on the instant, and I suspect you will not be heard anyway for your pains. Do you understand?”
The boy nodded, his face draining from deep red toward pallid blue. The giant man set him down and he whooped chestfuls of air into his suffocated body, coughing and sputtering on the floor of the chamber.
The huge man waited, smiling indulgently. Finally, the youth looked up at his shadowed and fearsome old face. “You are Folkher, aren’t you? You wander from town to town, spreading your lies with the truth so that no one remembers the true story any longer and then you take a victim and you leave again.”
The man shook his head, but his face bore an expression that looked, in the wrinkles on his cheeks and forehead, as though he was impressed by what the lad said.
“You are nearly correct. It is needful for me to wander, going from village to village at night, though I do not always accept sacrifices at every location. Innocent blood is best. It may last me a long while.
“It is also needful for me to retell the tale in a way so as to disguise what happened to us. Bloody though it is, none may know from the lays so told today that, for hundreds of years, we have remained vital, vibrant, wending our way throughout the lonely earth, biding our long time until the Judgment itself, before which time we shall not, can not be killed, so long as we continue to drink of the blood of the living.”
“You are monsters! Devils!”
He shrugged. “We are the Vagi. We are not many, but we hold sway over the earth. Man with his frailties and fashions may fade away, but we continue to endure.” He bowed his dark towering face down toward the boy. “Come with us,” he said.
The boy opened his mouth to refuse, but something flashed at the end of the arm of the meistersinger and as the boy turned his head to follow it, seeing it to be the fiddle bow and something dark hanging from it, falling, splattering to the floor, even as he looked. The breath he had taken to say t
hat he would much rather not go with him after all, was escaping from his gaping empty mouth and he began to feel wet warmth spreading from his neck, and over his chest as his hands fell limply at his sides.
His gasp escaped in a spray from his opened throat as the giant took him up again, still like a great piece of fruit he was ready to eat, and lifting the boy high above the floor, horrible, one-eyed, immortal Hogni brought the boy’s hotly bleeding throat up to his bearded mouth and drank.
* * *
The chronicles of 1207 tell of the devastating destruction by burning of an ancient noble house in the village of Weilla, east of the Rhine. There were no survivors found, although the paupers nearest the ruined hall spoke fearfully of seeing a young boy, pale as though utterly bloodless, save for sanguine stains about his neck and chest, fleeing fast into the Forest Schwarzwald. He was closely followed by a massive, shadowy beast, which bore one burning red eye and strode upright. Crossing themselves continually, the peasants begged God deliver them, having been among the few to witness the Devil himself and dressed in his own flesh and form.
The Squat
By Dene Bebbington
Phil had spent the last month scouting the town for a new place to stay. Tall, with dreadlocks, and wearing Doc Martens, he looked like a storm trooper of the dispossessed. He was used to Mr. and Mrs. Respectable's wary glances when he passed them in the street. At night, he'd go out looking for likely houses with no lights on and no cars on the drive. Then, he'd follow-up on any possibilities in the daytime, peering in through the windows to check for signs of habitation. Trying to find a friend who lives in the neighborhood was well-practiced patter and it usually got him out of tricky situations with suspicious residents.
One of his occasional mates who did housebreaking to get by hadn't been so lucky. Recently, he had disappeared; Phil assumed he'd been spotted by a busybody and had been arrested.
Over the last two years, Phil had picked up an entourage of fellow squatters, including Marta, his current girlfriend. She'd come over from Poland on the European Union's live-anywhere-you-want scheme. Though she worked, a squat was cheaper than renting; she wasn't fussy and was comfortable living with transients. Empty places were harder to find because the town had been on the up in recent years, becoming popular with well-heeled commuters who moved in and inflated the house prices. He left Marta to announce the good news while he went out on a freegan hunt for the next week’s food.
“Phil thinks he's found a new squat for us on the edge of town,” Marta said to her squat mates.
“I hope the fucking developer doesn't buy that one too. Did Phil say if there's a for sale sign?” Joe responded.
“No, looks safe. No sale sign and nobody home. Phil watched it a few days while you lot sat on arse.” She had to consciously stop herself from slipping into heavily accented Polish when annoyed. English is okay for normal conversation, she thought, but nothing better than your own language for having a row.
“Sod off,” Joe said. Underneath the animosity, he secretly fancied her. He loved the foreign accent and wanted to get hold of her pert arse that wiggled as she walked. But she was Phil's woman and too emotionally demanding for him anyway.
The four of them sat in the messy living room of an unloved Victorian terraced house. Furniture, if it could be called that, consisted of a handful of beanbag chairs and sleeping bags; empty food packets and other detritus littered the floor. They'd been here for a couple of months, soon after a property developer bought the run down house in an auction—a classic doer-upper. All of the utilities had been switched off to increase the pressure on the squatters until the eviction order came through.
Phil returned in a good mood with a large bag of food. “Get your stuff together. We'll go to the new place tonight,” he said.
They gathered their basic collection of bean bag chairs, sleeping bags, a few clothes, a couple of camping stoves, pots and pans, and a good supply of weed. Joe was in a bigger huff than usual, his good moods becoming more rare by the day. Those capitalist bastards have won again, he fretted.
“Hold on a minute, I forgot something,” Joe said as they vacated the house. He returned to the living room. With a smirk, he pissed on the wall and floorboards, leaving a dark stain and stink of ammonia for whoever arrived after they'd gone.
“Ready now?” Marta asked peevishly when he re-appeared at the door.
“Yeah, just wanted to leave them a housewarming present,” he said, laughing.
Marta rolled her eyes.
The group walked away lugging backpacks and holdalls. A nosy old woman in the house next door gave a smile of relief as she saw them leave, their forms alternately turning orange as they walked under streetlights.
Phil took them around the back of their new place; a narrow stone path guided them between brambles and overgrown grass. He put his gear down and rummaged in a holdall for the crowbar.
“Are you sure it's empty?” asked Joe.
“Yeah. There were no lights on for a week, and the windows are so grubby I couldn't see inside. Been deserted for ages, I reckon.”
“I hope this isn't another house someone died in. They give me the creeps,” Christa said.
“Stop your whining,” Marcus told her. “We'll have a party when we're in. I picked up some bottles of vodka earlier,” he said, rattling his bag and winking at Johnno.
Christa smiled; it didn't take much to keep her happy. A spliff, some booze, and a bloke were her few ambitions in life.
Grunting, Phil levered the crowbar back and forth in the door. A few splintering sounds later it gave way; he nearly toppled over as the door finally flipped open on the last hard push with his weight behind it. They traipsed in, using torches to see in the gloom. The ground floor of the house was an open plan with no separate rooms, only a staircase leading to the upper floor.
“What the hell's this? Someone's gutted the bloody place,” Phil said, more to himself than the others. “I'll take a look upstairs.”
At the top of the stairs, he shone the torch around the room; it was the same as downstairs. He examined the walls and ceiling, running his hand along the wall; it felt cool and smooth—too smooth. The lack of any power sockets, light switches, light fittings or even skirting boards left Phil perplexed. “What on earth?” he whispered to himself before heading back down to the ground floor. On the way, he didn't notice a crinkling sound at the far end of the room behind him.
“Didn't you have a look around upstairs?” Marcus asked. “We didn't hear your footsteps.”
“Of course I had a look around, but it's the same as down here. Nothing. No rooms, plumbing or anything.” The house, little more than a shell—a construction blank canvas.
“This place is strange, but fuck it. It's too late to find anywhere else now, and I'm not going all the way back to our last squat. Let's get the candles going. I need a drink,” Marcus replied.
All of them were knackered from the walk. The squatters lit a few candles and settled down on their beanbags to have a smoke and guzzle vodka. Joe started to moan about developers again; the others ignored him while they tried to mellow.
“Has someone been dicking about with the door?” Phil asked. Initially more curious than perturbed, he continued to examine the house. The door they'd broken in through looked untouched, as though it'd never been opened. “Where's the handle?” he continued.
The others looked at each other askance. “Maybe there wasn't a handle,” Christa said, trying to be helpful for a change.
“What door doesn't have a bloody handle on it? It was there when we came in. I used it to close the door behind us.”
“Stop frettin, mate. Come and have a drag on this,” Marcus said, waving a spliff tantalizingly in his hand after taking a drag.
Phil reluctantly joined them. An hour passed and most of them relaxed despite the concern about the door.
“Where am I supposed to go for a piss if there's no bathroom?” Marta asked.
“Go anywhere u
pstairs, babe,” Phil told her.
“Come with me, will you? This place is spooky.”
“It's only a house. I'm not babysitting you on toilet duty.”
Marta gave him the finger and stormed off to the staircase. She tentatively walked up, waving her torch from side to side. A crinkling sound startled her when she'd reached the top, but the torchlight showed only a small section of the dark room at a time. Feeling unsettled, she pulled her jeans down and squatted by the wall near the staircase. Nervousness made it difficult for her to pee.
A giant slug-like shape formed out of the wall near the ceiling and slithered towards her. Hearing the crinkling sound again, she waved the torch. She saw nothing in the cavernous room, not even a shadow since the room was devoid of anything to throw a shadow. The windows were dark too. Perhaps it's something outside in trees, she tried to reassure herself. A few seconds later, Marta screamed when she felt her head enveloped in a rubbery substance. Before she could flail or shout again, the unfathomable creature silently sucked her inside it, absorbing her like a snake ingurgitating hapless prey that strayed too near fate's maw.
“Aren't you gonna see if Marta's all right?” Christa asked Phil.
“Nawh, she's probably just seen a spider or something,” Phil said, weed and vodka making him feel too chilled-out to go on a pointless errand.
“You okay, Marta?” Christa shouted.
No answer.
“Oh, for bollocks sake,” Phil moaned as he stood up, swaying. At the top of the staircase, he shone his torch around the room a couple of times before realizing that Marta wasn't there. His face took on a quizzical expression, the kind a drunk gets trying to remember something important. “Marta!” he shouted. The word disappeared rather than echoed as it should in an empty room.
Desperately, he tried to push through the grogginess. This time, he shone the torch over the walls and ceiling. The beam scanned left, right, and stopped at an amorphous relief in the wall. Moments passed as Phil tried to understand what he was seeing. He went to touch the dark lump, but it felt unnatural and resistant to touch. In panic, he turned and skittered down the stairs, his feet slipping over each stair lip so that he nearly fell onto the floor at the bottom.
Dark Light Book Three (Dark Light Anthology) Page 8
